What I learned today - well, really a while ago

Some people love to share their knowledge, often as soon as it is acquired. I, on the other hand, like to mull it over a bit, see if I can improve it, tweak it, consider whether it was really as valuable as I may have impulsively thought before. Or I could say that I just procrastinate in posting about it. Nope, the former sounded better!

Here are three food finds that have made my life better!

1. Sriracha chili sauce
Since it opened a long, long time ago, David and I loved Dougie's fire poppers and hot wings. Nothing like eating greasy protein while the roof of your mouth burns. But I despaired of being able to replicate the recipe - even the supposedly taste-alike recipe of the husband of an Ulpan friend never panned out, and web searches yielded nothing. Then Pesach came and went, and Rami Levy was out of Tabasco sauce. Problem, because we like Tabasco in several recipes that would not be the same without it. So I bought Sriracha chili sauce (Thai chili sauce in Hebrew), thinking it might be a substitute. Well, it's not. It contains sugar a a few other ingredients that Tabasco (chilis, vinegar, and salt) does not. But lo and behold, it tastes just like what I remember Dougie's sauce tasting like! First I used it to heat up leftover schnitzel, cut in pieces and sauteed. Then I used it to baste chicken wings. Mmmm! All of the flavor, without all of the pesky health code violations that made Dougie's Restaurants an endangered species. Now I just have to work on replicating the chili, and we are good to go...

2. Magic season salt
Over Pesach, Lori gave me a recipe for brisket, which included seasoned salt as an ingredient. She also kindly gave me a recipe for the seasoned salt. We liked the brisket, we loved the season salt. We now sprinkle it on chicken and saute it for a quick dinner, sprinkle it on Amnon fish (more or less Tilapia) with a little schwarma seasoning and olive oil and bake for an easy, spicy lunch, sprinkle on zucchini slices and roast, sprinkle it on stir-frying vegetables, sprinkle it on baked potato, we just sprinkle it a lot. In fact, it was a major component of last night's dinner. The original recipe is found here, but I made a couple of changes: I omitted the cornstarch (not sure why it is absolutely necessary, unless you are keeping it for a long time), and decreased the salt. I usually make a double recipe and cut the salt to half or 3/4's of the listed quantity (putting in between 2 and 3 tablespoons for a double batch). You may want to play with this yourself, but even with the full amount it was very good. And the name - the kids were so astonished by how tasty the chicken was and how simple its preparation was that they called it magic chicken.

3. Cool drink
If you put a fruity tea bag into a glass of diet 7-Up, it makes a really refreshing drink with a twist - "Fruit Galore," "Wild Berries," and "Cranberry" (all Wisotsky flavors) were really good.

And that's the accumulated wisdom of this season...

UPDATED: I have gotten rid of (what I hope is all) the appalling typos that made reading this post an adventure in decoding. My apologies. Sometimes I write with the simple intention of getting something posted, but I would never stand for that in a student, so how can I accept it from myself?

Dvora